Speaking of Eastern thinkers, I recently finished and loved Grant Hardy’s Great Courses lecture series about Asian intellectual history. I found it to be a near-ideal overview of a very large field: vivid and clear, and presented with a lot of likable enthusiasm. (Unless you have money to burn, don’t buy the series until the Great Courses puts it on sale, when it’ll cost about a quarter of what they’re asking for it now.) I’m looking forward to listening to Hardy’s other Great Courses series soon.

Let’s send the policy intellectuals back to Yale where they belong, writes Andrew Bacevich. Why do we look to academia-based “experts” for advice about anything, is something I often wonder.

How wonderful are tiny houses in reality? I’m all for living modestly, and god knows I shrink in horror from the typical American love of raw square footage as much as the next boho, but there’s also such a thing as too small.